157 research outputs found
Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions
Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use
of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active
terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and
addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great
capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in
energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals
from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The
complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle
to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on
system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient
implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon
technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the
bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example,
prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real
time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing
of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna
paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article
summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal
processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on
low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how
terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology
and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future
research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin
Relaying systems with reciprocity mismatch : impact analysis and calibration
Cooperative beamforming can provide significant performance improvement for relaying systems with the help of the channel state information (CSI). In time-division duplexing (TDD) mode, the estimated CSI will deteriorate due to the reciprocity mismatch. In this work, we examine the impact and the calibration of the reciprocity mismatch in relaying systems. To evaluate the impact of the reciprocity mismatch for all devices, the closed-form expression of the achievable rate is first derived. Then, we analyze the performance loss caused by the reciprocity mismatch at sources, relays, and destinations respectively to show that the mismatch at relays dominates the impact. To compensate the performance loss, a two-stage calibration scheme is proposed for relays. Specifically, relays perform the intra-calibration based on circuits independently. Further, the inter-calibration based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codebook is operated to improve the calibration performance by cooperation transmission, which has never been considered in previous work. Finally, we derive the achievable rate after relays perform the proposed reciprocity calibration scheme and investigate the impact of estimation errors on the system performance. Simulation results are presented to verify the analytical results and to show the performance of the proposed calibration approach
AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing
The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for
higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of
more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the
increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density
increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are
connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna
access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of
data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while
enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be
possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being
the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated
access points.
In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time
but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full
spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using
a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter
which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital
circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed,
comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to
achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to
nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC
and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our
knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO
gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly
with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per
client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin
Multi-Antenna Techniques for Next Generation Cellular Communications
Future cellular communications are expected to offer substantial improvements for the pre- existing mobile services with higher data rates and lower latency as well as pioneer new types of applications that must comply with strict demands from a wider range of user types. All of these tasks require utmost efficiency in the use of spectral resources. Deploying multiple antennas introduces an additional signal dimension to wireless data transmissions, which provides a significant alternative solution against the plateauing capacity issue of the limited available spectrum. Multi-antenna techniques and the associated key enabling technologies possess unquestionable potential to play a key role in the evolution of next generation cellular systems.
Spectral efficiency can be improved on downlink by concurrently serving multiple users with high-rate data connections on shared resources. In this thesis optimized multi-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmissions are investigated on downlink from both filter design and resource allocation/assignment points of view. Regarding filter design, a joint baseband processing method is proposed specifically for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, where the necessary signaling overhead can be compensated for. Regarding resource scheduling, greedy- and genetic-based algorithms are proposed that demand lower complexity with large number of resource blocks relative to prior implementations.
Channel estimation techniques are investigated for massive MIMO technology. In case of channel reciprocity, this thesis proposes an overhead reduction scheme for the signaling of user channel state information (CSI) feedback during a relative antenna calibration. In addition, a multi-cell coordination method is proposed for subspace-based blind estimators on uplink, which can be implicitly translated to downlink CSI in the presence of ideal reciprocity. Regarding non-reciprocal channels, a novel estimation technique is proposed based on reconstructing full downlink CSI from a select number of dominant propagation paths. The proposed method offers drastic compressions in user feedback reports and requires much simpler downlink training processes.
Full-duplex technology can provide up to twice the spectral efficiency of conventional resource divisions. This thesis considers a full-duplex two-hop link with a MIMO relay and investigates mitigation techniques against the inherent loop-interference. Spatial-domain suppression schemes are developed for the optimization of full-duplex MIMO relaying in a coverage extension scenario on downlink. The proposed methods are demonstrated to generate data rates that closely approximate their global bounds
Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits
The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in
energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly
improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of
massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels
decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases,
thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference.
Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether
the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This
paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver
hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and
the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case
of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on
the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE.
Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while
the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and
inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes
negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by
massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger
hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and
energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment
Receive Combining vs. Multi-Stream Multiplexing in Downlink Systems with Multi-Antenna Users
In downlink multi-antenna systems with many users, the multiplexing gain is
strictly limited by the number of transmit antennas and the use of these
antennas. Assuming that the total number of receive antennas at the
multi-antenna users is much larger than , the maximal multiplexing gain can
be achieved with many different transmission/reception strategies. For example,
the excess number of receive antennas can be utilized to schedule users with
effective channels that are near-orthogonal, for multi-stream multiplexing to
users with well-conditioned channels, and/or to enable interference-aware
receive combining. In this paper, we try to answer the question if the data
streams should be divided among few users (many streams per user) or many users
(few streams per user, enabling receive combining). Analytic results are
derived to show how user selection, spatial correlation, heterogeneous user
conditions, and imperfect channel acquisition (quantization or estimation
errors) affect the performance when sending the maximal number of streams or
one stream per scheduled user---the two extremes in data stream allocation.
While contradicting observations on this topic have been reported in prior
works, we show that selecting many users and allocating one stream per user
(i.e., exploiting receive combining) is the best candidate under realistic
conditions. This is explained by the provably stronger resilience towards
spatial correlation and the larger benefit from multi-user diversity. This
fundamental result has positive implications for the design of downlink systems
as it reduces the hardware requirements at the user devices and simplifies the
throughput optimization.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 16 pages, 11
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/one-or-multiple-stream
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